Gary Gensler Says Crypto Investors Should Embrace SEC Regulation

Gary Gensler has positioned himself as one of the most consequential policymakers in American finance. He didn’t start off as a regulator. The Baltimore native and self-­described “markets person” spent 18 years at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., where he became a partner at 30 and led divisions including fixed income and currency trading in Asia. Gensler left to serve in senior roles in the US Department of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton, where he helped to pass a law that kept over-the-counter derivatives unregulated.

But in 2001, in the wake of corporate frauds such as those at WorldCom and Enron, Gensler went to work for Maryland Senator Paul Sarbanes on drafting the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to improve public-company accounting and disclosure. And after the 2008 financial crisis, he was nominated by President Barack Obama to reform the $400 trillion swaps market as chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission—regulating the very market he’d once helped keep free of regulation. Industry executives who negotiated with him at the time have described him as a formidable opponent and a deft Washington operative.